Uncovering Toxicity Impacts to Improve Regional Banana Production

For AgroFair, a large banana importer looking to differentiate its products, PRé developed the easy-to-use Pesticide Footprint tool to quantify the toxic impacts of pesticides on human health and freshwater ecosystems.

Profiling your Product in A Sea of Labels

How do you differentiate your product in terms of sustainability when all similar products are also covered by a sustainability label? In a philosophical sense, this is a great problem to have; the world all sustainability labels and companies are striving for. In a business sense, it is an opportunity to look for environmental impacts that the current sustainability labels don’t cover, and to start the ball rolling to the next level of sustainable production.

Pesticide Footprint Tool for Banana Production

This is exactly what AgroFair did. A large importer of bananas, AgroFair ran into the situation that nearly all bananas are now sold with some kind of sustainability claim. To find out whether toxic impacts from pesticide use can be a differentiating factor, AgroFair and PRé collaborated to develop Pesticide Footprint, a user-friendly tool to easily assess the impact of pesticide use on human health and freshwater ecosystems. Since banana production varies tremendously in its pesticide use, this turned out to be a valuable idea. PRé did a case study of three different farms, finding large differences in toxic impacts. Additionally, the AgroFair team received training to use the tool to generate more pesticide footprints, so they now have in-house capacity to gain insights that can help improve their stakeholder collaboration and customer communications. For more information, please read the full case study [PDF].